Mists of Pandaria

We’ve gone 9/14 normal in our first week, and I’m here to share some notes with you. It’s time for the second four encounters in SoO. Hopefully I’ll be able to have more later this lockout. As per usual if I don’t mention something specifically, just assume you can do whatever you want. From now on in the Gear sections I’m just going to assume that everyone will be going RPS. Instead I will point out potential opportunities to use the DPS LMG or Cloak.

Galakras

The Rundown:

Trash: Nothing particuarly special. Just remember to interrupt the shamans and blow up the cannons. You can use the cannons to kill trash faster if you like.

Talents: Wild Charge, Typhoon, SotF/Incarnation, Bash, DoC/NV.

Glyphs: N/A.

Gear: There’s a lot of adds in this fight, so using the DPS cloak is a good idea. Probably want to keep the tank LMG because of phase 2 though.

Encounter Notes:

Tank everything inside the Blizzard.

Varian is a moron. Taunt things back from him when he goes full idiot.

Bonecreackers are what will kill your NPCs the fastest. Knock them out of the their stun/smash thing with Typhoon or Bash.

Don’t stand in Proto-Drake fire.

Kill Banners instantly.

Silence/Stun/Interrupt the Shamans.

If you’re tanking on towers, just remember to not fall off.

Swap on Galakras around 6 or 7 stacks. Remember to stand off to the side to drop yours.

Iron Juggernaut

The Rundown:

Trash: I think there’s trash. Obviously if there is I don’t remember anything about it.

Talents: Wild Charge, Incarnation/SotF, NV/DoC

Glyphs: Stampeding Roar.

Gear: No cleave and the mines can hurt if you’re not careful. Go with the tank cloak and tank LMG.

Encounter Notes:

Swap every 3 stacks or so.

You can easily pop 2 mines by stepping on one, then using Wild Charge to get to the 2nd.

Be careful with your health when popping mines. Sometimes healers don’t react super fast and you have to wait a little bit.

Keep your back to a wall during his turret phase.

This fight is actually a really big joke.

Dark Shaman

The Rundown:

Trash: There is a lot of trash. And you have to kill all of it. The Kok’kron Shadowmages are really brutal, make sure you lock them down.

Talents: FS, Typhoon, Incarnation/SotF, Vortex, NV/DoC.

Glyphs: Stampeding Roar.

Gear: There’s no cleave you can help with. The bosses hit really hard during Bloodlust, so tank items are generally recommended.

Encounter Notes:

Swap when the tank that currently has Haromm reaches around 5 stacks.

Stay the fuck out of EVERYTHING.

The dogs are pretty meaningless. Just kill them.

You’re going to have to be running around all the places. Don’t be afraid to do so.

Make sure to Typhoon and/or Vortex the slimes to keep them away from people.

Hopefully you stay alive long enough to kill it.

General Nazgrim

The Rundown:

Trash: More Shadowmages. There’s some Shamans as well. You can either kite them away from their totems or separate them out one by one.

Talents: FS, SotF/Incarnation, NV/DoC.

Glyphs: N/A.

Gear: There’s a little bit of cleave, and the boss himself doesn’t do that much damage. Can probably use both DPS items.

Encounter Notes:

Swap at 3 stacks.

Kill banners ASAP.

There’s no reason you need to go help with adds.

This is probably the first boss where you can reliably use HotW as a DPS cooldown.

If you take DoC there’s a lot of burst single-target raid damage to watch for.

We’ve gone 9/14 normal in our first week, and I’m here to share some notes with you. I’ll do the first four encounters today, with others to follow later. As per usual if I don’t mention something specifically, just assume you can do whatever you want. From now on in the Gear sections I’m just going to assume that everyone will be going RPS. Instead I will point out potential opportunities to use the DPS LMG or Cloak.

Immerseus

The Rundown:

Trash: I don’t really know if the trash does anything at all. I know you only have to clear one side of the stairway, but that’s really it.

Talents: Wild Charge, Typhoon, SotF, Bash.

Glyphs: N/A.

Gear: The boss does basically no damage, can definitely get away with using the DPS LMG and/or cloak.

Encounter Notes:

You can’t really do anything to heal the blue adds, so just focus on the black ones.

Charge, Typhoon, and Bash are all great for cc’ing the slimes.

Swap after each Corrosive Blast.

Don’t stand in puddles..

Don’t get hit by the wave.

Incarnation is very likely to get completely wasted later on in the fight. Might as well go with SotF.

Fallen Protectors

The Rundown:

Trash: None.

Talents: FS/WC, Incarnation/SotF, NV/DoC

Glyphs: N/A.

Gear: Plenty of cleave opportunities makes a great reason to bring the DPS cloak. I’d probably go with the tank LMG though, as pushing a Protector over at the wrong time is bad news.

Encounter Notes:

If you end up tanking Rook, make sure you face him away from the raid when you go in for Sun’s Desperate Measures.

Remember to turn around for He’s Gouge.

You generally want to avoid pushing over more than one Protector at a time.

We stacked all 3 Protectors for Inferno Strike and killed Sorrow first during Rook’s Desperate Measures.

Norushen

The Rundown:

Trash: Stay right as you start down the hill from the Protectors area. This will allow you to skip most of this huge trash area. None of it does anything particularly interesting.

Talents: FS, Incarnation/SotF, Bash, NV/DoC.

Glyphs: Stampeding Roar.

Gear: Not much cleave to be had, although you could help out by using the DPS LMG – especially once purified.

Encounter Notes:

The “tank” trial is pretty easy: Run out of Titanic Smash, and interrupt Hurl Corrpution.

Swap every 3-4 stacks or so.

Later on in the fight you’ll need to soak Residual Corruption. Remember you can only soak until 100 Corruption.

Send your best DPS and healers into the tests first. Tanks shouldn’t start going until the 3rd or 4th group at the earliest.

The tank that isn’t active on the Amalgam of Corruption should be picking up Manifestation of Corruption.

Don’t get hit by the laser.

There isn’t really a “good” time to use HotW, although if you get purified first you could probably arrange it.

Sha of Pride

The Rundown:

Trash: Dodge purple stuff on the ground. Yes you have to kill all of it.

Talents: FS, SotF/Incarnation, NV/DoC.

Glyphs: N/A.

Gear: The boss himself does hardly any damage, can probably use both DPS legendaries.

Encounter Notes:

Swap immediately for Wounded Pride.

Don’t get hit by the sha explosions when they spawn.

If you’re not actively tanking feel free to help out with Reflections if no swap or Prison is happening soon.

We had tanks handle the SE prison by themselves since the large add spawns on the west wall.

This fight is super boring as a tank.

Siege of Orgrimmar Discussion Threads

If you have questions about something that isn’t covered here, please check out our Siege of Orgrimmar threads over in the forums.

Guide Updates

Both the regular Guardian Guide and the Gear Guide have been updated for 5.4. A lot of what you’ll read here is repeated in those guides in more detail.

The official forums, MMOC, and EJ guides are not fully updated yet. I have a ton of content to put out before those are all done, so it may take a while. Also the Icy Veins Guardian Guide should be up-to-date soonish.

General Changes

Proving Grounds is a new feature where level 90 players can test their mettle and undertake trials designed for Damage, Tank, or Healer roles to test and improve their combat skills in a safe, controlled environment.

It’s no real secret that I’m super excited for Proving Grounds. I haven’t really had a reason to play WoW beyond raiding and CMs for guildies for a while. Proving Grounds will certainly get me back into the world more, and I look foward to competing with all of you ^.^

Wrathion’s final quests are now available for dedicated heroes who have fought on his behalf throughout the Pandaren campaign. He’s waiting at the Tavern in the Mists in the Veiled Stair.

The legendary chain is finishing up with the final cloak. You can technically get this on day 1, but there’s going to be a lot of people out there. I probably won’t get mine until the weekend. If you missed the BiS list progression tanks will want to primarily go with the “tank” cloak, but it doesn’t hurt to have the “DPS” cloak around for funsies.

All taunt type abilities now increase all threat generated against the target while the taunt is active by 200%.

Pretty much eliminates problems found as a result of tank swaps. You should never have a problem with your co-tank not being able to hold threat off of you on a swap anymore.

Characters in a tanking specialization now generates 40% more threat.

Vengeance now grants Attack Power equal to 1.5% of the damage taken, down from 1.8% (The tooltip said 2% but it was actually 1.8%).

Tanks no longer receive Vengeance from many persistent area damage effects (standing in the fire) or from missed attacks (dodging and parrying an attack will continue to work as it has before).

Vengeance gains from being critically hit have been reduced by 50%.

There are now diminishing returns on Vengeance gains while tanking multiple targets. Each additional target grants progressively less Vengeance.

So as not to affect Challenge Mode leader boards, the above Vengeance changes will not apply there. For Challenge Modes, Vengeance will continue to work as it did in patch 5.3.

Basically a book of changes to Vengeance. The gist is tanking everything is no longer a good idea, nor can you use the environment to game Vengeance levels anymore. The notable exception is Challenge Modes, where Vengeance is actually a huge portion of the content.

The patch notes don’t include a fix to how Vengeance works for dodges. Essentially if you have a debuff that increases the damage you deal, you will no longer receive a lesser amount of Vengeance for an attack that you dodge, compared to an attack that hits you.

Capacitive Primal Diamond, and Legendary melee cloaks (Fen-Yu, Fury of Xuen, and Gong-Lu, Strength of Xuen) now have a 40% reduced chance to activate its effects for characters that are in a tanking specialization.

Nerf to bring the DPS LMG in line with the tanking one. Now you have to make an actual choice on what you want, rather than the DPS one being insanely good – especially in 10m. The DPS cloak isn’t really that great since it has a relatively low proc rate, and deals physical damage.

Indomitable Primal Diamond’s effect now grants a 20% damage reduction to all damage taken (up from only physical damage), and its activation rate has been doubled.

Tank LMG got hella buffs. It’s now actually really good, and you will definitely want it for progression encounters.

Guardian Changes

Bear Form now increases Stamina contribution from cloth and leather items by 40% (up from 20%).

Buff to deal with the EH issues we suffered in the 25h version of ToT. Probably an overbuff for 10m, but not much they can really do about that right now.

Innervate now restores mana based on the Druid’s Spirit.

Just take it off your bar. Seriously.

Teleport: Moonglade now returns the Druid to a location near their original departure point when the spell is cast while in the Moonglade area.

Yay! I really like Moonglade, but it takes forever to get back to civilization afterwards :(

Wrath now deals 10% more damage, but has its mana cost increased by 50%.

Doesn’t change anything in terms of HotW burst. You still want to dump your Energy bar with Cat Form & Berserk first, before switching to Wrath.

DoC Guardian: Increases the amount healed by Healing Touch by 20%. Increases the critical strike chance of Mangle (Bear) by 10% and critical strikes of Mangle (Bear) have a 40% chance to make the next Healing Touch or Rebirth instant, free, and castable in all forms. Instant cast version of Healing Touch now benefits from Attack Power instead of Spell Power.

DoC is now by far the best constant raid utility talent in T6. It basically amounts to permanent NS. I definitely recommend taking this talent for any heroic raider, if you don’t need HotW.

Doesn’t matter. Their AI still needs help, and they deal basically no damage. Stay away from this talent.

Mass Entanglement no longer has a limit on the number of targets that could be affected, up from 5.

Cannot express how much I do not care.

New talent: Ysera’s Gift. Ysera’s Gift replaces Nature’s Swiftness, and heals the Druid for 5% of their maximum health every 5 seconds. If the Druid is at full health, it will heal the most injured friendly target nearby instead.

Probably what I’m going to end up taking most of the time, especially when I have DoC. One less talent to micromanage, and it has really good throughput – especially with the Stamina buff. Renewal still wins out for scaled down content (PGs and CMs), and if you don’t take DoC then you may want CW. Up to you and how much you’re willing to put into managing the different talents.

Nature’s Vigil when activated now increases all damage and healing done by 12% (up from 10%), and causes single-target healing spells to trigger an additional heal on a nearby ally for 25% of the amount healed. This is in addition to the existing effect where it damages a nearby enemy target for 25% of the healing done.

Damage bonus is inconsequential. When I was testing it on the PTR though, our 4t16 bouns was triggering the extra healing. I don’t know if that was intended, or even if it was still the case.

SotF Guardian: Increases Rage generation from Mangle (Bear) by 30% instead of an additional 3 Rage, and this talent now also applies to the Rage generated by Mangle (Bear) when it triggers Primal Fury.

Now becomes a very viable alternative to Incarnation. I will probably use this talent most of the time unless I need the burst from Incarnation for some reason.

Thick Hide now reduces the cooldown on Barkskin by 30 seconds.

Purely because of General Nazgrim. However I’m not going to complain about what is really a big buff. I expect this change to get reverted in 6.0.

Glyph of Fae Silence will now cause Faerie Fire to interrupt when used on targets that are immune to silence effects.

Set Bonuses

Our 2t16 bonus is merely a neat little way to extend a Savage Defense, nothing more. Our 4pc adds further damage smoothing via a “rolling” self-heal. You probably won’t notice either bonus too much, but you’re going to get them anyway because our tier pieces are the best itemized ones for each slot.

And that’s it! I’ll be recording Proving Grounds tomorrow and hopefully posting some videos for everything over the next couple of weeks. Also stay tuned for normal mode SoO Guardian videos.

I know haven’t done one of these in a while. I had expected that the patch would come out tomorrow, so I was working on guide updates. Turns out that’s not the case, so I’m back to the usual. Here we go!

PTR Changes

Fen-Yu, Fury of Xuen now does 20% of AP damage to up to 5 targets, down from 40% of AP damage to all targets. Now is 1.62 PPM, up from 1.5.Capacitive Primal Diamond, and Legendary melee cloaks (Fen-Yu, Fury of Xuen, and Gong-Lu, Strength of Xuen) now have a 40% reduced chance to activate its effects for characters that are in a tanking specialization.Indomitable Primal Diamond’s effect now grants a 20% damage reduction to all damage taken (up from only physical damage), and its activation rate has been doubled.

Honestly, did anyone not see this coming? Anyone with half a brain can tell that a single Meta gem contributing up to 15% of our total damage is broken. Admittedly communication wasn’t the greatest since they inferred first that they weren’t going to nerf the DPS LMG. It was probably pointed out that was a hopeless endeavour.

I’ve already talked about the buffed tank LMG. It’s great. Everyone should use it for progression, and/or have two different helms.

Wrath now deals 10% more damage, but has its mana cost increased by 50%.

Dream of Cenarius (Guardian) now also increases Critical Strike chance of Mangle (Bear) by 10%. Your Mangle (Bear) critical strikes have a 40% (was 45%) chance to make your next Healing Touch or Rebirth instant, free, and castable in all forms, and benefit from Attack Power instead of Spell Power.

Essentially a nil tradeoff in proc rate for a (tiny) DPS and Rage increase. I’ve mentioned before that I think the DPS loss for DoC is probably worth it, given how effective the healing gain is. Similar to the old Battle Healer glyph.

Blue Posts

GC did a blogpost about all of the class changes that are coming through in 5.4. Most of it was pretty uninteresting and stuff we already knew. I’ll repeat the relevant parts anyway.

We buffed Guardian spec Stamina outright because we felt the spec needed it. Druids have less reliable damage reduction, which isn’t a problem itself, so long as they have the health pool to compensate for it.Most of the changes to Druid talents were because of the situation where certain specs leaned heavily on certain talents in a row and tended to ignore the others—Dream of Cenarius, Force of Nature, Nature’s Vigil, and Soul of the Forest fall into this category.

None of that is news to any Guardian really.

On a larger scale, we’d really like to find ways to make the macro system smarter. Right now, it’s not uncommon to see players with several different macros for raid markers, target switches, and so forth, and we’d like to look into some ways to address that. Again, not likely to see any major changes there in the short term, but we recognize that the macro system could use some updates. It’s on our radar.

That bit kind of intrigued me. I have macro slots filled with various different things, and I (in addition to many others I know – especially Feral PvP) have been clamoring for updates to the Macro system for a while now. Obviously there’s a priority list, and since Macros aren’t exactly “broken” it’s probably not that high on the list. It’s still interesting that they’re looking at ways to make it better though.

We have a variety of different abilities that we have talked about, but I am not going to name any. We still have to wait and see if we can actually pull it off. There are certainly a lot of abilities that any given player has that they probably feel obligated to have on their action bar but almost never use. Those are the buttons that we want to try and do away with, especially if a player feels obligated to have a keybind for it. That is where it really starts to get nasty. We will be looking into that, but I can’t really commit to if and how much.

I’ve brought this topic up before (most recently on the last episode of TWP) but I think there are some abilities that are legitimately totally superflous for Guardians. Ravage, Maim, Moonfire, and Innervate are probably on the top of my list of things that could be killed off for Guardians specifically.

I don’t know about adding another glyph slot type, as I feel like Minor Glyphs accomplish that pretty well. I could certainly see an argument for increasing the number of Minor Glyphs that you can get or something like that. We are pretty happy with the general way that it works out and we will continue to add more Minor Glyphs whenever we have cool new ideas for what to do with them.

The reason I bring this up is kind of complicated. I was doing some heroic scenarios with my friends Serrinne and Perculia last week, and we randomed into a couple of the goblin ones. The thing is, when you zone into an instance that changes your form you stay in Bear form for the purposes of the game, but you look like whatever form the game forced you into. So for these scenarios I looked like a little goblin, but still had all of the Bear animations.

I thought that was fucking awesome.

Obviously this is a glitch with these kinds of instances, but it got me to thinking…why can’t we have this for real? It would be pretty cool to at least have the option for it.

An item level squish is likely for the next expansion and is already being tested internally.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anybody. Shit is just getting out of control, and predicting where we’re going to end up at the end of an expansion during the initial beta is like playing blind Darts.

Tweets

As mechanics, dodge and parry are interesting. As stats that appear on gear, we’re not so sure.

In an era where AM exists, resource generating stats are always going to be more fun. It’s totally possible to work avoidance stats into resource generation, but if you have to do that maybe we should be asking “Does this do the same thing as stat X only worse?”

I wouldn’t be surprised if avoidance stats are killed off completely in the next expansion (we already treat them like they don’t exist anyway).

I have a lot of things to cover, so this one may be longer than normal. Most of it is just general tank stuff, but there are a couple of Guarfdian-specific things I’ll cover as well.

Buraan Joins TiB!

This is by far the most important piece of news I have to announce. After Wens quit because of R/L and my own guild’s inadequacies, there’s been a distinct lack of heroic-level content on TiB. I’ve always maintained that the best theorycrafting is done by 1 part math and 2 parts practical experience. With that in mind, I needed someone to pick up the slack in terms of heroic content.

Who better to have talk about it than (agruably) the #1 Guardian in the world? Yeah, I don’t have an answer to that either.

In any case, it is with great pleasure that I announce Buraan as the new contributing author for TiB. He’ll be covering heroic progression content through SoO and hopefully beyond.

Obviously you should follow him on Twitter and watch his stream as well.

Welcome!

PTR Changes

There are an absolute fuckton of these this time around. I’ll try and make sure I catch them all.

Vengeance now grants Attack Power equal to 1.5% of the damage taken, down from 1.8% (The tooltip said 2% but it was actually 1.8%).Tanks no longer receive Vengeance from many persistent area damage effects (standing in the fire) or from missed attacks (dodging and parrying an attack will continue to work as it has before).There are now diminishing returns on Vengeance gains while tanking multiple targets. Each additional target grants progressively less Vengeance.

The first two are pretty obvious. Vengeance was getting out of control compared to tank survival, and standing in fire to increase your Vengeance was a design oversight anyway. It’s the last one that’s rather vague. Thankfully Lore posted some details for us:

The basic, concise explanation is as follows: The Nth strongest (based on pre-mitigation average auto attack DPS) mob that has hit you in the last 5 seconds grants 1/Nth of full vengeance with their attacks. N is recalculated on every hit taken.So here’s an example. Say you’re tanking 3 mobs – we’ll say it’s a boss and two adds. The boss has pre-mitigation average auto attack DPS of 1500k, one add does 400k, and the other add does 300k. The game will form a list of those mobs from 1-3, like so:
1. Boss: 1500k DPS, 1/1 (100%) of normal vengeance is granted
2. First add: 400k DPS, 1/2 (50%) of normal vengeance is granted
3. Second add: 300k DPS, 1/3 (33.333%, repeating of course) of normal vengeance is grantedThis would of course continue as more mobs are being tanked (granting 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, and so on). Also, if the second add were to land a hit at any point when the first add hasn’t attacked you in the last 5sec (such as if it swings first), that attack would grant 1/2 Vengeance instead of 1/3.

So the example Lore gave is totally unrealistic. In order to put it in perspective I came up with something that most Guardians are probably familiar with: Heroic Tortos Bats. Details below (note this for 10m heroic):

A Vampiric Cave Bat on 10m heroic has an autoattack DPS of ~85k (taken from a friend’s log from last week’s kill using approxmiate Mastery values) give or take. Click here for log.

Which means under the current Vengeance scenario we’d cap out at around ~240k (20 * 85000 * 0.018 * 8) after 20 seconds. The bats die long before that happens though.

Slashlove (one of the Tanking forum regulars) made a quick post positing that using 1/sqrt(n) would be a better idea than simply 1/n while accomplishing the same goal (Source). Let’s look at what happens then:

30 + 21.2 + 17.3 + 15 + 13.4 + 12.2 + 11.3 + 10.6 = 131.

Suddenly much more palatable. Yeah, I like Slash’s better. Another thing to remember is this same logic also applies to Challenge Modes and Proving Grounds, both of which feature a plethora of AoE pulls. So maybe we’ll see a change to this formula, and maybe not. Only time will tell.

So as not to affect Challenge Mode leader boards, the above Vengeance changes will not apply there. For Challenge Modes, Vengeance will continue to work as it did in patch 5.3.

Well apparently time did tell. There you go.

Chance on being hit by a melee attack to gain a 20% reduction to all damage taken for 15 sec. (Approximately 2.57 procs per minute, ICD: 3 sec)

So this is the update to the tanking meta gem that was mentioned last week. The change to all damage reduction by itself is really good, but bumping the RPPM up to 2.57 takes it to almost a 50% uptime (actually ~47%, but hey). That makes it incredibly good, and definitely much, much better than it was before.

Does it compare to the existing DPS LMG? Probably not yet. However I’m definitely expecting that tank RPPM mod to get nerfed with extreme prejudice in an upcoming build. That will definitely put the tank LMG solidly ahead.

Trinket, enchant, set bonus, and legendary meta-gem effects whose triggered effect benefits from haste no longer also have their chance to trigger the benefit from haste. Activation chances for those effects have been adjusted to compensate.

There’s been a whole host of changes to the RPPM trinkets. I took the liberty of updating the RPS spreadsheet with the changes, and here’s the result:

Note, all of these trinkets are the double-upgraded versions. Primarily I’m just trying to show how fucking goodRenataki and Bloodlust are now. Everything is basically complete shit by comparison. The new RPS trinkets in SoO don’t even come with passive stats, so they’re fucking awful. Granted almost everyone is going to be using the CDR trinket anyway, but still. It’s good to know what your RPS options are. Special thanks to Theck for helping me sim Bloodlust with the new ICD.

Thick Hide now reduces the cooldown on Barkskin by 30 sec.

I’ll admit, my first reaction to this was WHAT THE FUCK. Then I realized this was probably part of the whole “solution to Nazgrim” thing GC was tweeting about last week. I checked with Buraan, and he agreed with me. So with the CDR trinket we’ll have a 25 second CD on Barkskin (30 / 1.2 = 25). This means that we can have up to 2 minutes and 12 seconds of 100% Savage Defense uptime. That’s actually kind of ridiculous. Close to triple the current value.

That screams broken to me, but what the heck do I know. Everything about this patch screams broken to me. However I wouldn’t be surprised if our 2pc bonus changes as a result.

Dream of Cenarius now increases the Critical Strike Chance of Mangle by 10%. Chance to proc a Dream is reduced to 40%.

I actually just tested this on the PTR. The proc is now 20 seconds in duration, which is pretty incredible. The real question becomes is the Mangle change enough of a DPS gain to offset the GCD loss?

Well the number of procs we get in ~553 gear is: 0.8 * 0.4 * 0.21875 * 60 = 4.2. So that’s 4 GCDs we’d spend per minute (out of 40) on Healing Touch / Rebirth. For the sake of argument let’s assume that all of these GCDs are Lacerates. We then know that Lacerate does 0.616*AP in damage, so missing 4 per minute would be a loss of (2.464 + 1.848) or 4.312*AP in damage.

We also know that Mangle does (0.5*AP) + 7*WeaponDPS in damage. In the course of 1 minute you would have ~13 Mangles (0.21875*60). Without DoC those Mangles would deal 11.05*AP + 154.7*WeaponDPS in damage. With DoC this number increases to 11.7*AP + 163.8*WeaponDPS. A difference of 0.65AP and 9.1 WeaponDPS.

Subtracting like terms we get 9.1 WeaponDPS = 3.662AP. Since we know a 561′s weapon DPS is 8187.5 that means the break even point is (9.1*8187.5)/3.662 or 20345 AP.

So yes, it’s still a DPS loss. How much?

At 200k AP it comes out to around 12k DPS or so. Nothing to sneeze at to be sure, but look at what we gain in return. It’s probably most analagous to the old Battle Healer glyph. Yes we trade a bit of DPS, but we gain a ton of very effective healing in return, plus a little Rage as a bonus. I’ll take that trade any day of the week.

Yeah, changing the way it works. Long term, we want Guardian less focused on dodge more on AM. High armor and health are cool.

At first this caught me by surprise. However after a bit of thinking I realized that this is definitely a 6.0-era change. What could it be? Well a while ago on MMO-Champ (I’ll be damned if I can find the exact post) there was a suggestion to have Savage Defense also increase our Armor. I think that’s the direction GC is talking about here. Cool by me.